Development of an invasive brain-machine interface with a monkey model

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) translate neural activities of the brain into specific instructions that can be carried out by external devices. BMIs have the potential to restore or augment motor functions of paralyzed patients suffering from spinal cord damage. The neural activities have been used to predict the 2D or 3D movement trajectory of monkey’s arm or hand in many studies. However, there are few studies on decoding the wrist movement from neural activities in center-out paradigm. The present study developed an invasive BMI system with a monkey model using a 10×10-microelectrode array in the primary motor cortex. The monkey was trained to perform a two-dimensional forelimb wrist movement paradigm where neural activities and movement signals were simultaneous recorded. Results showed that neuronal firing rates highly correlated with forelimb wrist movement; > 70% (105/149) neurons exhibited specific firing changes during movement and > 36% (54/149) neurons were used to discriminate directional pairs. The neuronal firing rates were also used to predict the wrist moving directions and continuous trajectories of the forelimb wrist. The four directions could be classified with 96% accuracy using a support vector machine, and the correlation coefficients of trajectory prediction using a general regression neural network were above 0.8 for both horizontal and vertical directions. Results showed that this BMI system could predict monkey wrist movements in high accuracy through the use of neuronal firing information.